


Her Musician

by Dog_Bearing_Gifts



Series: La Guitarra [2]
Category: Coco (2017)
Genre: Guitar, Idea not mine, Inspired By Tumblr, Movie Timeline, curse, guitar alebrije, inspired by headcanons, perspective shift
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-14
Updated: 2018-04-14
Packaged: 2019-04-22 21:14:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,557
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14317269
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dog_Bearing_Gifts/pseuds/Dog_Bearing_Gifts
Summary: Seventy-five years after Ernesto de la Cruz's death, a young boy sets his sights on his grandfather's guitar. Follow-up to His Guitar.





	Her Musician

The crash and clatter of metal on tile are partially buried by the fireworks, but both are enough to wake the dead.

She has never been dead. She has never been alive, not in the way the living understand it, but she hasn’t been fully awake of late. In the long silences between each Día de Muertos, it’s easy to slip into a state rather like dreaming, where memories flit past one another without emotion, without substance. She began slipping toward it the moment the groundskeepers finished lining the floor with cempasúchil, the moment they closed the door and locked it.  

But now, at that noise, she is awake.

There is a small pause, followed by the slap of shoes on marble. Moonlight illuminates the figure of a young boy, short hair and a red chaqueta. He remains in a crouch for precious seconds, but he doesn’t look out the windows. No, he looks up, he looks around at the cold white palace built for a murderer. He stands, wonder smoothing his features before his foot strikes the broken lock and a wince creases them.

Something about him, something she can’t place, reminds her of a song from long ago.

He creeps forward, eyes widening with each step as they land on….the portrait? That beneficent smile has held the gaze of many, but why would a child break into a mausoleum to stare at a painting?

His gaze doesn’t shift, but its object becomes clearer as he closes the distance.

It isn’t the painting.

It’s _her._

She knows it even before he jumps onto the casket, freezing as his weight shifts the lid. Not enough to expose what’s underneath, not enough to turn his crime into the stuff of nightmares, but it stirs up dust.

Once he’s on stable ground he pauses, and his wonder becomes reverence. She sees him now, round face and wide eyes, ears she’s sure everyone says he’ll grow into. The song is louder now, but no clearer; she can grasp most of the melody but not specific notes. If he would only—

His fingers brush her strings.

Him.

It’s him.

Not Héctor. He hasn’t returned for her, but his grandson has. Great-grandson, great-great grandson—she sees little difference. This is Héctor’s grandson and he’s _here._ Here with her, here with the music she can hear pulsing through a few memories that spring to his mind, all too quick and jumbled together to tell her anything besides the fact he’s taken the noise inside of him and turned some of it to music and that music is why he is here.

In a mausoleum.

Kneeling on a grave.

Touching a stolen guitar.

He swipes through the dust and smiles at his reflection. An innocent, disbelieving sort of smile. Energy arcs through that touch, filling the air with a cold and audible hum.

Does he know?

He must know. He’s learned of her, of Héctor, of how they were separated. He knows about Ernesto and the music and Héctor, he knows of Héctor.

He knows. 

He has to know.

He sits back, gazes up at the painting. “Señor de la Cruz?”

 _I know what you did,_ he’ll say. She wants to sing the words as he says them, turn them to warm, joyous notes that echo off the walls. _I know this isn’t your guitar, and that’s why I’m here. What I’m doing might be wrong, but maybe I can make it all right, somehow._

“Please don’t be mad. I-I’m Miguel, your great-great grandson.” He reaches toward her, but she can’t think beyond what he said.

Miguel.

Your great-great grandson.

He doesn’t belong to Ernesto. He belongs to the man he left lying dead on the cobblestone. The only family Ernesto will claim is the one he bought with his brother’s life.

Thoughts and memories float to the surface at Miguel’s touch—her likeness in the family portrait, Ernesto’s face imposed where Héctor’s should be, the joy and relief and exhilaration as the pieces flew together to create the wrong picture.

The worst is true. All those years paraded as a trophy, all those years she sat unclaimed, weren’t the result of a lost battle but of surrender. Héctor’s steady march toward the Final Death, a march she’s felt each year as he fails to cross the bridge, hasn’t been an act of familial neglect or oversight but of malice.

An act of Imelda.

“I-I need to borrow this.”

In that moment, as he lifts her from the hooks bolted to the wall, she almost believes he is Ernesto’s grandson. Héctor left offerings for parents he could barely remember, offerings that were never claimed, and here is his grandson stealing his guitar. She nearly strikes him deaf, but his memory of that photo, of the moment he believed Ernesto to be family and loved him accordingly, gives her pause. 

He sits, balancing her on his knee as he gazes dolefully up at his grandfather’s murderer.

“Our family thinks music is a curse. None of them understand, but I know you would have.”

So much sincerity—too much, for the man he’s speaking to. It’s like Ernesto’s perversion of the lullaby Hèctor wrote for his daughter—all of those sweet pure words are there, but the tune is wrong and it would be noise if not for the melody. A melody he sings with the innocent exuberance of a child presenting a gift to his parents. 

But the curse—he’s right about the curse. It has already taken him by the hand. She has yet to decide where it will lead him, but it cannot be dismissed. 

“You would have told me to follow my heart. To sieze my moment.”

She was taken from Héctor’s hands as the poison suffocated his music into silence. That first curse freed her when Ernesto failed to use his numbered years to make amends, but it didn’t vanish at his death. It settled around her through the solitude like the dust she collected. Unlike that dust, it cannot be removed with a swipe of the hand.  

Miguel has not doubled that curse, not truly. Only an act as monstrous as Ernesto’s could do that. But he has added to it, and he’s done it on Día de Muertos. Even the smallest child knows it is a time to give to the dead.  

With a curse of this magnitude, she can do almost anything.

He carries her through the cempasúchil, walking backward so Ernesto can leer down at their every step. She senses Héctor approach a veil that might as well be a wall.

If he were any fainter, he’d be a whisper.

“So if it’s all right with you, I’m gonna play in the plaza—just like you did!”

There is another alebrije in the graveyard. She’s felt his presence, heard his bark carried through the marble walls and babble of a hundred family reunions. A xolo.

She can feel the music bubbling to the surface as all his passion and frustration and despair and excitement come to a boil. She knows he can’t resist bringing some of that music to life, even if there is no song and no one to hear.

He lifts a hand into the air.

Her curse is right. There is nothing else for those who steal from the dead. The requirements, the terms, the undoing—they are what his act deserves.  

And they’re a chance. Not for him. For Héctor.

All of the noise within him turns to joy as he strums a chord and seals his fate.

Wind blows in from another realm, lifting the veil and folding it around him, pulling him through. Cempasúchil puffs upward in a cloud; light surrounds him. He doesn’t move, he doesn’t feel the shift, but he feels the wind and it brings confusion.

Voices surround the mausoleum almost immediately.

“The guitar!”

“It’s gone! Someone stole de la Cruz’s guitar!”

“The window’s broken!”

Beams from multiple flashlights back up their words. Miguel ducks into a corner, holding her close. The curse has settled around him like a heavy blanket; she feels it as acutely as she feels his fearful breathing.

Twenty-one is a young age to die. Twelve is even younger.

“All right! Who’s in there?”

Miguel sets her on the floor and raises his hands, stammering an apology that falls on unhearing ears. They’re on opposite sides of the veil now; even at its thinnest, the living cannot hear the dead through ordinary means. Only Miguel is surprised when the man walks through him, but the shock sends him racing out into the graveyard.

He won’t die.

The groundskeeper lifts her and places her back on the wall. “There’s no one here!”

She didn’t kill Miguel, not like she killed Ernesto. She simply sent him to a realm that will pull him in, bit by bit, until he is one skeleton among many. 

People press in to the doorway, craning for a look at the commotion. A set of voices carry over theirs—parents calling Miguel’s name.  

The xolo will guide him when the music cannot. His music, which is so much like Héctor’s, so full of passion and love, misguided but not corrupted, sung to the wrong audience but sweet and pure. 

It’s the sort of music that can guide a man home. 

**Author's Note:**

> A/N: Again inspired by im-fairly-whitty‘s guitar alebrije headcanons. Seriously, there's some fun stuff there.


End file.
